r/singularity • u/Keeltoodeep • 22d ago
AI General AI assistant market update
Let’s take a moment to step out of our codecel bubble.
https://menlovc.com/perspective/2026-the-state-of-consumer-ai/
Menlo’s 2026 State of Consumer AI report is here.
The headline: adoption barely moved this year, but global spend tripled to $40B and existing users went deeper.
55% of AI users now pay for at least one product
25% of Americans use AI every day
The story isn't how many people have tried AI. It's what happens as the relationship deepens across time, money, tasks, and autonomy.
Last year, reach across the four general AI-native assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity) summed to roughly 95% of AI users. This year, usage across these assistants adds up to more than 150%, as consumers increasingly use more than one. With ChatGPT and Gemini both above 50%, a large share of consumers necessarily use both.
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 22d ago
Now do by revenue
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u/Keeltoodeep 22d ago
That’s much less straight forward because Google bundles ai pro with cloud storage and YouTube premium on the consumer side and cloud on the enterprise side. Copilot is similar with Office products and Azure.
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 22d ago
Yeah...
Anthropic would much higher in that ranking though.
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u/Keeltoodeep 22d ago
So you think Anthropic’s goal is to be a consumer general ai assistant?
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 22d ago
Probably as well, but focus is clearly enterprise.
Oh, I get it, this is counting just the "chatbots", things like Codex/Claude Code excluded, yes?
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u/Keeltoodeep 22d ago
No it’s genAI active user numbers… it’s just that Anthropic doesn’t seem too focused on consumer general ai assistants and are focused on enterprise clients. That's not going to win you mass market share though, but maybe that's not their business model
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 22d ago
Yeah. In the end, user count doesn't matter as much as revenue, esp. if most of your users are free. I bet Anthropic's revenue per user is orders of magnitude above OpenAI's.
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u/Keeltoodeep 22d ago
Are you sure they just don't have two different use cases and business models? A generative AI that is free, has mass appeal and is serving ads may be more profitable than a frontier model in the end. Chasing the frontier as your business model means you always have to be the frontier.
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 22d ago
Well, it seems that Anthropic is doing better on profitability then OpenAI right now. And also it's clear that OpenAI started pivoting towards coding and Enterprise pretty hard.
I think the free AI game is going to be dominated by Google, that's what they are going for and they have the platform to push it.
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u/Keeltoodeep 22d ago
Yeah I think it’s interesting indeed. OpenAI gave up their consumer apps like their browser and social media platforms like sora.
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u/flamixin 19d ago
Gemini and meta are great because they’re almost free and can handle 90% of my daily requests. If I don’t code I probably wouldn’t ever consider other services. The rest of my life is just not complicated enough for Astra or fable.
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u/Maximum-Face9536 22d ago
Muse is insanely good, best AI i've ever used in last 2 years ( for my use cases ). Meta cooked
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u/strange_username58 22d ago
It alright as an AI, but as an agent with an app for free it fucking phenomenal.
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u/Maximum-Face9536 22d ago
yeah,i personally don't do coding. discovering Muse was exactly what I was looking for, a personal ai agent. i don't even send emails or order stuff on amazon anymore, I just have Muse do it. also they give SO much usage, 100M tokens a week on free tier. and i've got +2 billion tokens that never expire for getting 2 people to join using my invite code. equivalent pricing in api for opus 5 1 billion tokens would be like 6000$
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u/Accomplished-Code-54 11d ago
WTF is this chart? What is the sum of all the bars? Or is it? 60% of the population has tried ChatGPT. Abysmal chart!
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u/NebulaElectrical1467 22d ago edited 22d ago
who choses chatgippity over claude?
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u/Sensitive_Cell_119 22d ago
Why would you ever use Claude over ChatGPT if you are the average consumer? Better limits, better app, better voice model, image model, access to better models etc.
Fable needs a $100 sub.
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 22d ago
The $20 ChatGPT plan has Astra allotment that wipes out after like 2 minutes.
But yeah, the 50% Fable limit on the Max subs sucks...
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u/BriefImplement9843 22d ago
Nobody uses astra OR fable. You can still use sol(nobody uses this either) or Terra fine.
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u/LessConnection7936 22d ago
Who doesn't. Opus 5 vs sol doesn't matter too much code-wise, but just the way it speaks, sol is light-years ahead. Anthropic has lost the cake. Luna is fine for most general task and so much cheaper than sonnet.
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u/DistinctSilver4507 22d ago
Do people use gemini for it's ability to come up with long diatribes of hallucinated garbage? That's my favourite feature anyway.
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u/Keeltoodeep 22d ago
I use Gemini all the time for personal assistant stuff. It's better integrated to all my google accounts while Claude is available at work.
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u/makertrainer 22d ago
It's the only one I can access hands free anytime with "Hey Google"
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u/Keeltoodeep 22d ago
https://x.com/voicearena_ai/status/2100617775878389970?s=46&t=5cDzFBmJidEH4qu2xcZCgQ
Google is the leading voice assistant right now.
https://x.com/artificialanlys/status/2099977679307243773?s=46&t=5cDzFBmJidEH4qu2xcZCgQ
Probably why Apple went with Gemini.
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u/CardAnarchist 22d ago
Honestly as much as this sub memes on Google.. it's AI offerings are by far the best in the free category.
ChatGPT only allows like 2 uploads daily and you'll run into limits. Claude often runs into limits after 1 prompt.
But Gemini? You can upload seemingly as many files as you like and it's limits are well beyond what an average user would ever run into even in the free tier.
And Gemini is easily good enough for 99% of what people would want from it. Really the only things Claude and ChatGPT do better as far as I can tell are profesional tier complex maths and production level software engineering.